Visual Studio Online REST APIs and Service Hooks

Since we launched Visual Studio Online last November, we've seen great adoption and usage across enterprise, small business and personal users, with over a million accounts created so far. With team collaboration, agile development, application insights, and hosted build and test services, Visual Studio Online makes it easy to get up and running in minutes on our cloud infrastructure.

Today, we released important new integration points for Visual Studio Online. These REST APIs and service hooks open up new integration opportunities between Visual Studio Online and a wide variety of 3rd party apps and services.

The Visual Studio IDE has always had a great extensibility and a great partner ecosystem. With over 100 partners providing hundreds of extensions, the ecosystem of products around Visual Studio is a key part of making Visual Studio an industry leading IDE. With the addition of rich Visual Studio Online extensibility points, we are expanding the reach of Visual Studio integration to many new scenarios.

The modern application lifecycle leverages a wide variety of services. Visual Studio Online can now integrate with many of the most popular cloud services like Trello, GitHub, Jenkins, HipChat, and more. Developers can build custom applications that extend the power of Visual Studio Online, with Visual Studio Online providing a hub for ALM in the cloud.

The Visual Studio Online service now exposes a collection of REST APIs for programmatically accessing and manipulating data in many Visual Studio Online services, including Projects, Accounts, Work Items, Git, TFVC, Build, Team Rooms and more. These REST APIs use standard JSON and OAuth2, and can be accessed from any HTTP client.

For example, a developer can programmatically access the Git repositories in their Visual Studio online account.

In addition to these REST APIs, Visual Studio Online exposes a collection of service hooks which send information to other services on interesting events that happen inside Visual Studio Online – things like builds completing, work items being updated, or code being pushed. Visual Studio Online supports direct integration with over a dozen services, as well as integration with task automation services like Zapier that let connect to an even wider variety of services.

Visual Studio Integration Portal

Along with the new APIs for Visual Studio Online, we've also launched a new Visual Studio Integration portal with details about integration with the Visual Studio IDE, Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Online.